Hulu in ’11: $420MM revenue, 1.5M paying subscribers

Hulu made $420 million in revenue in 2011, CEO Jason Kilar announced on the company’s blog on Thursday afternoon. Hulu now also has more than 1.5 million Hulu Plus subscribers, and Kilar reiterated his projection that Hulu Plus will be responsible for more than half of the company’s revenue later this year.

Some other metrics shared by Kilar include:

Hulu grew its content catalog 40 percent in 2011, compared to 2010.

The content on Hulu Plus even grew by 105 percent.

Hulu Plus is now available on an aggregate install base of 200 million devices, including game consoles, mobile phones, tablets and connected TVs as well as media streamers.

Hulu has had more than 1000 brand advertisers since its launch.

Hulu will invest around $500 million in content in 2012.

Kilar also took a shot against Netflix without mentioning the service by name by suggesting that rights holders fare better when signing up with his company than with Netflix:

Our dual revenue stream Hulu Plus business model enables us to compensate content owners much more than anyone else in the online subscription market on a per subscriber basis. At scale, our model allows us to profitably pay content owners approximately 50 percent more in content licensing fees per subscriber when compared to other similarly priced online subscription services.